


Glitch in the System: The Mission

by SystemGlitch



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Missions Gone Wrong, Team Talon (Overwatch), akande ogundimu and the horrible terrible no good very bad decision
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-14
Updated: 2017-09-21
Packaged: 2018-12-29 20:42:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12093039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SystemGlitch/pseuds/SystemGlitch
Summary: A four-part arc detailing a mission gone wrong and the aftermath thereof.Part 1: Fool's Errand, by K.Part 2: Apagando las Luces, by E.Part 3: Chelsea Morning, by K.Part 4: Romance Languages and Shit, by E.





	1. Fool's Errand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> By K.
> 
> Akande takes some very obvious bait.  
> Widowmaker is Not Pleased.  
> A bad decision happens.

Akande Ogundimu, one eyebrow raised in pointed curiosity, sat opposite his top agents at the head of a long oaken table. Fingers steepled beneath his chin, he considered the information laid across its polished surface: a collection of printouts which Sombra, demonstrating exactly enough early-morning wherewithal to remember pants with her nightshirt, tossed before him as she entered the conference room.

“What, exactly, am I looking at?” he asked, arranging each paper before him until they comprised a perfect grid of greyscale images and walls of text. Sombra sat heavily across from him, legs splayed over one arm of the high-backed chair.

“Someone’s being nosy,” she replied airily. “Nosy and sloppy.”

“Would you care to elaborate?” Gabriel rasped from the far wall, his back to the rest of them as he kept vigil over the slow drip of coffee from spigot to carafe. Somehow, even in a tank top and basketball shorts, Reaper was still perfectly capable of darkening whatever corner he settled in.

“Watched pots and boiling, Gabriel,” Widowmaker muttered in tired singsong, glancing over her shoulder. Behind her, the scarred man grunted his irritation and turned to face them, arms crossed.  

“Someone’s been trying to access Talon’s databases - personnel files, research and development, travel itineraries - you know, easy shit. And they’re doing it loudly,” Sombra explained.

“So, they’re either amateurs or they want us to notice,” Akande observed.

Sombra nodded. “ _Claro_. So, I did a little research of my own. Everything leads back to an IP address hosted in Milan. I tracked it all the way back to its host server. Also suspiciously easy.”

“And?” Akande asked expectantly.

“It’s a trap,” Gabriel grunted, turning back to the coffeemaker as it chimed the completion of its function.

“It’s a trap,” Sombra agreed. “You don’t track mud in a house you’re robbing unless you’re doing it on purpose.”

Doomfist leaned forward in his seat, dark eyes roving the intelligence laid before him. Widowmaker watched him coolly, the way his brow knit as he narrowed his focus to one image: a server room, long and narrow, its floor lined wall to wall with identical, broad-framed towers, one of which Sombra had circled by hand. Akande was a hard read; his decisions were unpredictable, his commitment to strength through chaos provoking choices occasionally erring on the side of rash while still somehow well within the scope of his ongoing game of martial chess. Lowering her gaze, she watched as he moved that single photo directly in front of him with one finger.  

“What’s this?” he asked.

Yawning, Sombra craned her neck to verify.

“Host server. Back left corner. Basement of a high rise.”

Setting a mug before her, Gabriel took a seat beside Widowmaker, curling gnarled, broad hands around his own as he settled. She nodded her thanks before glancing back to Akande tapping that same, thoughtful finger against the edge of the photograph. She could see the gears turning behind his eyes, the falling of puzzle pieces into their respective places.

“You’re not sending us in there,” she said, incredulous.

“I might.”

“We just said it was a trap,” she continued, deftly procuring the photograph from beneath Doomfist’s finger and setting it on the table between her and Gabriel. “A trap with no viable positions.”

Beside her, Reaper stroked his goatee as he examined the printout.

“Sombra could shut them down,” he suggested. “Less time. Less money.”

The hacker shrugged. “ _Es verdad_.”

“When a child misbehaves, you teach them by setting an example,” Akande grinned, rising from his seat. “I would like to provide these children a - what is it? - teachable moment. You leave in twenty four hours.”

* * *

An innocuous ding heralded end of their elevator ride, its cheery tone a stark contrast to the lethal intent of its riders. As the doors whispered open, Sombra waved a hand over the elevator’s interface panel, an intangible network of neon pink circuitry and the quirk of a notched eyebrow the sole evidence of her manipulation. After a few seconds’ passing, the doors locked into place with a churning metallic click.

Before them stretched the basement floor: an expansive spate of pale concrete lined with row upon row of server towers blinking their artificial heartbeats in vibrant reds and greens. Above them, a narrow pathway of cold steel grating connected four corner platforms, forming a perimeter overlooking the first floor. It was exactly as it appeared in the intelligence Sombra provided a day earlier, and exactly as tactically disadvantageous as Widowmaker suspected.

Peering around the edge of the doorway, the sniper made out two men at the opposites end of the room, stationed across from one another on either side of the upper walkways. From this, she assumed there were troops positioned on the landings on either side of the elevator shaft as well. These were in addition to the soldiers patrolling the ground floor, meandering between towers.

“Far left corner?” Widowmaker asked, pulling her head in.

Sombra waved a hard light display into existence. Through it, her colleague watched as she navigated a three-dimensional rendering of the room, accurate down to the number and arrangement of  server towers. A series of diagnostics ticked by along the uppermost edge as Sombra navigated the map in a succession of twist and flicks of her wrist. Moments later, the feed came to an abrupt stop and one of the model towers blinked.

“Far left corner,” she confirmed, waving the holoscreen out of existence. “Servers on all sides.”

Widowmaker glanced around the doorframe again, re-examining the layout of the room as it pertained to their objective.

“No line of sight,” she observed. “Once you are in, you’re on your own.”

“If you can get me there, I can do the rest,” Sombra said, tugging a translocator beacon from her belt and dropping it in the corner opposite the taller woman. “We’ll eat them for lunch.”

Widowmaker rolled her eyes. Though she didn’t doubt either of their capabilities, Sombra’s unflagging self-assuredness - a trait they shared, and one she grew to find almost endearing - felt misplaced given their acute awareness of the trap awaiting them.

“I’ll take your two, then ten; four and seven after that,” she explained as she dropped to one knee. Bracing one shoulder against the flat inner pane of the doorframe, Widowmaker pressed her cheek against the butt stock of her rifle and gave Sombra one final sideways glance.

“Ready?” she asked.

“Always.”

“ _Rapidement, cherie_.”

Returning her gaze to the scope of her gun, Widowmaker took a single, deep breath, ushering in the steady white noise of her own pulse in her ears as she lined up her shot. A second, then two, then a third passed as she settled languidly into familiar, cold nothingness and affixed infrared crosshairs over a face, its features indistinct and unimportant.

She exhaled, then fired, the sharp thud of the rifle’s butt against her shoulder shoving the world back into motion.

Sombra was gone, vanishing before the soldier on the far right landing toppled over the railing and hit the floor with an underwhelming crunch. Widowmaker withdrew as the troop stationed on the opposite landing retaliated, bullets ricocheting off the steel frame of the elevator in quick succession. Across the floor, she heard the telltale rapid discharge of Sombra’s machine-pistol and a wave of fresh suppressive fire that gave the sniper all the time she needed to roll to the other side of the elevator and train a second shot on the now-distracted soldier above her.

Lowering her rifle, she pressed two fingers to the side of her visor, activating its built-in communicator. “Ten and two down,” she reported. Above her, two distinct sets of footsteps echoed their progress toward the fallen troop across the room.

“I know,” Sombra grinned, appearing from thin air beside her. “So far, so good. Now, the hard part.”

“I know,” Widowmaker parroted with a single leveling breath as she stood. “ _Allons-y._ ”

She didn’t give Sombra a chance to reply before she bolted from the elevator, spun on her heel, and fired her grappling hook, leaving the hacker behind and below her as she ascended to the second story landing. Her efficacy at this point was limited by her ability to leverage surprise and unpredictability; with the first floor being better suited to close-quarters combat and the second offering nothing in the way of cover, she couldn’t rely on a single position any longer than was required to take a shot. The best course of action was to stay mobile, keep the enemy guessing, and buy Sombra the time and space to do her job.

The momentum carried her over the walkway railing where she landed, unnoticed, on the left platform above the elevator. At the other end, the troops previously stationed at and across from her current position attended the second of their fallen colleagues, offering Widowmaker exactly enough time for one target. It would alert the other soldier in turn, but she was already miles ahead of him.

She inhaled, leveled, exhaled, and fired, the minuscule gestures required to take a life as natural and reflexive as the easy breaths that bookended them. Across from her, one man crumbled while the other turned in her direction lifting his rifle into position as she lowered hers, its muzzle collapsing as she switched to automatic fire.

Their exchange was swift, cacophonous, and over in seconds as the soldier’s knee collapsed from under him, tearing an agonized yelp from his throat. As if on cue, a fresh burst of fire reverberated from below, succeeded by another man’s haggard groaning.

“Widow?” Sombra murmured over their comms channel. “I’m nuking this server and we’re getting the Hell out of here. Something’s not right.”

Stepping on and over her fallen opponent, Widowmaker rounded the far right corner and knelt, training her weapon on the wall opposite and below her as her visor slid into place. Beyond the rows of servers, she could just make out the top of Sombra’s head - an awful position, but the only viable one given the narrow spacing of the broad-framed towers. Her auxiliary lenses offered a fragmented panorama of the space around her, but the far corner which contained their objective was blocked almost entirely from sight.

It would be a nightmare for anyone else; to her, it was simply a challenge.

“I have you in my sight, Sombra,” she confirmed.

“Just don’t make this the one time you miss, okay?” the spy asked.

Widowmaker didn’t reply. She waited, calm and quiet, the entirely of her attention concentrated on that single point with meditative focus.

“This isn’t right,” Sombra said. “There’s no firewall.”

That’s when Widowmaker saw him: one man, darting between towers toward her accomplice. The positioning of servers offered him the same overbearing cover it did Sombra, ensuring he was visible only in fleeting glimpses.

“You missed one,” she commented matter-of-factly. “On your six.”

Silence.

“Sombra?”

Buzzing artificial silence filled the airwaves. This was Widowmaker’s responsibility now.

Following the enemy soldier’s trajectory, she focused her sight on a gap between servers and waited, watching as the space between him and her colleague dwindled to mere feet.

She inhaled.

Steadied.

Exhaled.

Fired.

Missed.

Gunshots rang from below and Widowmaker was already running.

She vaulted over the railing in a single, fluid motion, landing a few rows over and behind the enemy troop with time enough to watch Sombra collapse against the wall. Dropping her machine-pistol, the hacker pressed a hand to her shoulder in an ineffectual attempt to stem the flow of blood eking rivulets between her fingers. Her attacker rounded on her, kicking the gun from her reach as he approached and placed the muzzle of his assault rifle flush against her forehead.

He said something to Sombra, low and snide and utterly self-assured as Widowmaker crept up behind him, pulling her grappling hook from its socket despite its tensile resistance and curling the length of its cord around her hands until it was as taut as she felt.

There was no inhale, no exhale; no leveling or focus. Instead, there was reflex, instinct, and coiling muscle as she took a running leap and pulled the soldier flush against her by the cord around his throat, toppling them both to the floor. He screamed, begging for mercy as he struggled against her grip, but Widowmaker didn’t hear or feel it; there was only blood - her own blood, perceptibly faster than usual and so much louder - and the arrhythmic pulse of his carotid artery petering to still nothingness against her wrist.

She held firm, even after his body fell slack in her arms, as she blinked back the stinging heat of what she recognized, distantly, as tears. Awareness dawned only in fractional increments: in the coolness of the concrete floor beneath her; in the weight of the dead man settling against her chest; in the blooming soreness borne of clenched teeth and the force of her breath behind them.

After what felt like an hour, Widowmaker shoved the body aside and climbed to her feet, delicately smoothing away hear tears with the heel of one hand. Why that response even persisted within the framework of her reconditioning was a mystery unto itself, but now was far from an appropriate time for consideration.

“ _Araña_ ,” Sombra managed between ragged leveling breaths. “We gotta’ go. Whoever these fuckers are, they hacked me. They  _hacked_ me, Widow.” She spat the fact like venom, caustic and brimming with spite.

Without a word, the assassin bent and scooped her partner into her arms, careful not to disturb her shoulder any more than necessary. “I’ll help you when you’re ready for revenge,” she offered, but the promise felt unhelpful; inappropriate. Sombra winced, curling tightly into Widowmaker’s grip with a plaintive, pained whine.

“ _Désolée_ ,” Widowmaker apologized, gently pressing her forehead to Sombra’s.

The hacker offered her a shaky grin before tucking her head beneath the sniper’s chin.

“I know.”


	2. Apagando las Luces

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> By E.   
> Sombra's perspective.  
> A clever trap happens.

The life of a hacker was, while exciting, often predictable: in her downtime, to assuage boredom, Sombra surfed the internet. Idly, for the most part, until she caught the scent of something that interested her. Then she’d sniff it out like a bloodhound, following trails and leads until she’d run her quarry to ground, deciding at some point along the way what it was she planned on doing with it once she caught it.

On this particular day, Sombra’s casual perusal of the internet had ended in a chase that led her to the front door of someone who had, with an incredible lack of finesse, crawled in through Talon’s virtual windows and left a royal mess in their digital carpet. It wasn’t a mess that had done any damage, and they hadn’t left with anything of value, but they’d managed to accomplish something particularly noteworthy in their trespass:

They’d pissed Sombra off something fierce.

She’d printed off what data she could translate to a black and white image, waiting with increasing impatience as the archaic machine slowly churned out pages of blurry images she could take to Akande. She wished, not for the first time, that everyone had implanted cybernetics so she could avoid having to use such cumbersome machinery.

Once Akande had seen them, of course he’d decided to send them in. Strength through adversity and whatnot. She’d figured he would, even though it was so painfully obvious that the entire thing was a setup. The man enjoyed teaching lessons and watching the shit hit the fan, and what was better for that than sending his best and brightest after a bunch of unruly children? It would be a slaughter, but for which party Sombra wasn’t entirely certain.

It wasn’t even a compelling challenge so much as it was embarrassing, walking into a trap so obvious it felt like they were building half the cage themselves. Sombra was restless, though, and ready for  _something_  to take her mind off her increasingly complicated feelings for her coworker.

“What’s wrong?” Widowmaker asked, leaning languorously against the other side of the elevator as they descended into the basement that was, Sombra reminded herself,  _one-hundred-percent a trap_.

“Stop doing that,” she said, narrowing her eyes at the spider.

“Doing what?” Widowmaker asked, legitimately confused in her graphene catsuit and posed with the impeccable poise of a killer.

“ _That_ ,” she repeated without any clarification, waving her hand in her direction.

The doorbell dinged, cutting off any response Widowmaker may have been summoning, and the two operatives snapped into mission mode like rubber bands stretched to capacity. Sombra hacked the elevator doors, locking them in place and preventing anyone but her from activating it in the future. Someday, someone would create hackproof technology, and that might finally be the point at which Sombra found herself faced with a challenge.

Until then she’d have to settle for jumping into shark tanks and starving the animals out of their own feeding frenzy.

“Ready?” the sniper asked.

“Always.”

_“Rapidement, cherie.”_

Sombra activated her camo, transitioning from sarcastic companion to silent killer in less than a heartbeat. She heard Widow’s first shot, saw the body drop, and answered with her own suppressing fire to allow her another deadly second.

“Ten and two down,” came the sniper’s voice over their comms, merging with her actual voice as Sombra’s body was sucked through time and space and deposited back in the elevator.

“I know,” she replied, ignoring the wave of nausea that overtook her from her momentary displacement. It passed more quickly each time it hit. “So far, so good. Now, the hard part.”

“I know,” Widowmaker nodded, standing. “ _Allons-y_.” Without further ado, she grappled her way up and out of sight, leaving Sombra alone to do her job.

“Time to teach that lesson.” Smirking, she activated her camo and fled from the elevator.

Widowmaker kept the sentries and backup busy while Sombra picked her way between towers, only managing not to get distracted by the trove of data she was surrounded with by force of willpower and a general sense of disappointment that they were expending this much effort for what was, essentially, a data bomb. Sombra would hack in, grab anything worthwhile, and drop a Trojan so big that they’d be on the phone with IT for years while it ate through their database like a piranha along a trail of blood. She just didn’t think there  _would_  be anything worthwhile, and it would have saved them all a load of time and effort if they’d just rigged the whole basement to explode and gone out for smoothies instead.

That plus, once again with feeling -  _this was a trap_.

Sidling up to the server, her sense of discomfort was growing louder like white noise crashing in her ears. From the start there was not enough resistance for a fortress of valuable data, and that they’d encountered up until now had been token violence to make them feel like they were accomplishing something. She’d hacked half the world’s systems and had found community banks with more security than this place. It felt wrong at its core, and she wanted to be out of there.

“Widow?” she hissed into her earpiece. “I’m nuking this server and we’re getting the hell out of here. Something’s not right.”

“I have you in my sight, Sombra,” was her reply, clear and comforting. She took a deep breath, gaining confidence from the sniper’s proximity and the security her watchful eye ensured. Nothing else about this operation was secure.

“Just don’t make this the one time you miss, ok?” she joked, smirking. Raising a palm to the server, she went in.

Bracing herself for the typical defense response of a high-security system, she nearly fell face first into the tower as she encountered absolutely zero resistance. One moment she was hacking the mainframe and the next she was  _in_  it, free flowing binary cradled within a SQL database that was easier to check out than a library book. Far from tantalizing, it was wrong, and she wondered if she’d misjudged the true aim of the trap they’d walked into. The question now was when it would be sprung.

If it hadn’t been already.

“This isn’t right. There’s no firewall,” she announced, vision still immersed within the neon code of the server. It began to flash like the inside of a rave, distracting her from absorbing any one aspect of the nonsense data being paraded before her. “This is not right. We have got to go.”

She pulled her hand away and found that not only was she unable to do so, but that any attempts at moving filled her body with immense pain. The rush of binary turned red, pulsing in through her fingertips and corrupting the cybernetics she was relying on to access it.

Realization hit her in a wave of nausea. It was a virus.

Sombra was being hacked.

Steeling herself against the agony, she grabbed her arm with her free left hand and pulled, tearing it from from the server in time to stop the flow of corruption, but not quickly enough to stop the pain. Somewhere in the back of her mind she heard Widowmaker talking through their comms, but by that point she’d lost the ability to focus, and her words vanished like smoke as she stumbled backwards, blind.

Her brain was telling her mouth to scream for help, but nothing was cooperating - not her eyes, not her vocal cords, and certainly not her legs as she tried desperately to get away from what was undeniably the bar springing on the mousetrap. The corruption burned through her, too hot for her to focus and too encompassing for her to escape.

She didn’t see the man as he approached her, but she did feel the tearing of a bullet through her left shoulder.

Tumbling to the floor, the burning virus searing her from the inside and the bullet wound gushing blood, she looked up in shock to see the shooter walking steadily toward her.

 _Widow, where are you?_  she thought frantically to herself, waiting for the kill-shot that would remove his head from his shoulders. So certain was she that it would come, she didn’t realize it hadn’t until she felt the cold metal of a gun barrel against her forehead.

“You must be Talon’s master hacker, yes?” the man grinned, snapping the safety off the gun. “It’s so nice to finally meet you.”

* * *

Sombra hadn’t thought about death since she was a child, when it was a present reality, her parents crushed beneath the omnic machine, leaving her a small flame at the mercy of a hurricane. The hurricane blew itself out and she kept burning until she grew into a forest fire, and then an inferno; she was too smart, too capable, too damn resourceful to die like a dog by a man with an assault rifle.

She hadn’t thought about death in a long time. Now, forced to confront her end with the kiss of cold metal against flesh, she realized that she did not want to die. Not like this; not helpless at the mercy of a stranger with a gun for a cause she found curious at best.

In fact, she realized - she didn’t want to die at all. She squeezed her eyes shut, pain spiking through her retinas, and despite the specter of death looming before her, all she could think was a profoundly confused  _where’s Widowmaker?_

_She never missed._

Where the shot of a gun and the sting of a that final bullet were expected, she heard a sharp cry instead. When she opened her eyes - the pain ebbing as she regained some focus to her sight - she saw the deadly, lithe form of Widowmaker with her grappling cord around her assailant’s neck. She hit him with such force that she fell over backward, the man’s struggling body atop hers as she pulled the line taut against his neck.

He was dead for a while before the sniper let him go. His throat was swollen and red from where she’d garotted him, and she shoved him off her like the soggy sack of flesh and guts he’d become. She stood up with tears streaming down her face - a golden-eyed angel of death staring at her like nothing else mattered in the world.

Sombra wasn’t sure what she felt at that moment: a muddled, vague mixture of relief, awe, and something else - something warmer that made her heart race even more than her brush with the grave. She struggled for control of her thoughts as well as her tongue, mind racing through a kaleidoscope of feelings too quickly for her to choose one to sit with.

When she finally found her voice, it sounded as pained as she felt. “ _Araña_ ,” she said, clutching her bleeding shoulder, “we’ve gotta go.”

Widowmaker’s eyes were focused on her, and she looked as though she was struggling with something. Sombra saw the wet tears making tracks down her face and wanted to ask what was wrong, but wasn’t entirely sure she was prepared to hear the answer. “Whoever these fuckers are, they  _hacked_  me. They hacked me, Widow,” she growled, indignant and impressed all at once. They would pay so dearly and so violently when she found them again.

Something heavy banged in the distance, followed by shouting voices. Without another word, Widowmaker knelt down and wrapped her arms around Sombra’s limp and bleeding body, lifting her effortlessly against her chest.

“I’ll help you when you’re ready for revenge,” she said in a voice that was velvet lined with shards of glass. Then, softer, “ _Désolée_.”

“I know,” Sombra replied as Widow pressed her forehead against hers. The shouting came closer, and she bounded toward the exit like a tiger after its prey, pausing only to pick up Sombra’s gun and hand it back to her to hold in shaking fingers.

Sombra rested her head in the space between Widowmaker’s collarbone and the length of her neck and listened to the disconcerting slow beat of her heart. Her skin was almost - almost - warmed from the exertion of the day. Clutching her gun, she let the sound beat like a war drum in her ear as they crashed through the basement and out to safety.


	3. Chelsea Morning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> By K.  
> Akande is a responsible, autonomous adult.  
> Widowmaker cooks. A lot.  
> A smooch (!) happens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is a reference to Joni Mitchell's "Chelsea Morning", which you can peep here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_y7O06z77Q.

Widowmaker wasted little time in procuring an audience with Akande inasmuch as she offered him no say in the matter. She stewed the entire flight from Milan to Venice, punctuating the assistance she offered their medic with sporadic reprieves to the observation deck. There, alone, the sniper paced in silence as she struggled with with the unplaceable, coursing adrenaline that fueled her restlessness and left her balling fists so tight they left tender, narrow crescents along the inside of her palms. Even devoid of the ability to connect with it on a cognitive level, she recognized the physiological manifestation of what, in anyone else, would be anger. Unfortunately, Talon’s air transport offered little in the way of outlets for that frustration; instead, she grabbed her comms device on one of her trips between the medical bay and observation deck and dialed Doomfist’s number with as much deliberate force as the screen could withstand.

“What?” he asked, irritation filtering through static space with digitized crispness.

“We are going to talk,”  Widowmaker commanded flatly. “ETA 1930.  _D’accord_?”

“Lacroix-,” Akande began, but she hung up before he could respond. It felt strangely vindicating.

* * *

After seeing Sombra to her room and tipping the medic generously, Widowmaker crossed to the eastern wing of the estate, ignoring evening greetings from other agents as she transitioned from the relative quietude of the west side to the bustling heart of their current operation. Taking the stairs two at a time, she made her way to the second floor and shouldered straight through Akande’s office door without so much as a knock.

Doomfist rose from behind his desk in acknowledgement.

“I don’t much appreciate being hung up on,” he said, setting aside a handful of papers as he stepped around the edge of the desk.

“I do not much appreciate being sent on fool’s errands,” Widowmaker replied, light and clipped as she closed the door behind her.

“Excuse me?”

“ _Fool’s errands_ ,” she repeated, giving the words enough space to emphasize the accusation. “You knew it was a trap. We all did.”

Akande stood unmoving as she approached, hands tucked into the pockets of his linen slacks; as always, an impossible read. Widowmaker gave her imprecation a wide berth, locking eyes with Doomfist as she waited.

“What do you want?” Akande asked calmly, his expression unwavering. The sniper inclined her chin, searching his face for any indication of intent and, unsurprisingly, finding nothing.

“What do you mean, ‘ _What do I want_ ’?” she asked.

“I fucked up,” he replied matter-of-factly. “No way around it. What do you want?”

Widowmaker pursed her lips, brows knitting thoughtfully. Her first inclination was to suspect foul play, and if Doomfist were anyone else, that reflex would be warranted. Akande, however, made good on his reputation as a man true to his word; as long as loyalty or the impression thereof was maintained, he rarely, if ever, leaned on deceit where it was unnecessary. In this regard, he was as transparent in his communication as he was opaque in his tactical decisions.

“Lacroix?” he asked, expectantly.

“Two weeks,” she replied. “Sombra, too. No questions. Expenses paid.”

Akande, eyebrows raised, tilted his head. “And?”

The assassin shrugged. “That’s all. Give me that and I forget this mission ever happened.  _Y’en a plus_.”

“Done,” Doomfist nodded. “Make your arrangements, give me a ballpark estimate, and we’ll wire the funds. Give our girl a week to get back on her feet and the next two are yours. Then we put this behind us.”

He extended a hand.

“Put what behind us?” Widowmaker asked, accepting the agreement with a single, firm handshake. Relinquishing his grip, the sniper turned toward the door.

“Knock next time,” Akande called after her.

“There had better not be a next time,” she concluded with a single, backwards glance.

* * *

All things considered, the breakfast Widowmaker managed to cobble together from their haphazard pantry was surprisingly robust. As the last of the toast decreed its readiness with a chirp and mechanically-bolstered leap into the air, she plated it and considered her work. It was heavy by her standards, possibly even excessive: eggs with goat cheese and a variety of sautéed vegetables, bacon, toast, fresh berries, yogurt, and, to her continuous chagrin, the same overly sweet cereal Sombra favored despite infinitely more complex and healthful offerings. Still, given the circumstances, the spread felt somehow insufficient. Lacking.

She turned abruptly toward the fridge, scanning its contents.

Champagne.

Orange juice.

“ _Parfait_.”

The medic had told her liquor was a poor idea - that nanotechnology expedited recovery but that soreness and pain would persist even after the wound was mended. For that lingering discomfort, he prescribed a relatively small but powerful regimen of painkillers for the ensuing week, offering the caveat that it be taken with food and to avoid drinking.

Popping the cork on the champagne, she scoured the cabinets for a flute and found only juice and pint glasses - both gauche in their own respects, but her options were limited. Settling for the latter, she poured the sparkling wine into the glass in equal parts with the juice and decided that what the medic didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. She knew  _she’d_  want a drink, were she in Sombra’s place.

She set the glass beside the dry cereal and adjacent cup of milk, shouldered the tray on which her work was arranged, and made her way through the hall toward Sombra’s room. She passed Gabriel en route, shushing him with a raised finger before he could so much as snicker.

“Just don’t,” she glowered. “Not today.”

Biting back whatever opening volley he’d prepared, Reaper rolled his eyes as loudly as possible before ducking around the corner.

Widowmaker continued uninterrupted, shifting the tray to her left shoulder as she approached the hacker’s door. She knocked lightly, lest her injured colleague still be asleep; even under that light touch, however, the door gave way with a slow, creaky groan.

“ _Manda huevos_ , doc,” Sombra whined from within. “If you’re here to check on me one more time—.”

The sniper poked her head through the door, quirking a perfectly arched eyebrow. “You’ll what?”

Propped up in bed with the aid of a collection of pillows, Sombra acknowledged the sniper with a tired half-smile and the ghost of a chuckle. “I honestly have no idea,” the hacker conceded, brushing a few strands of wayward hair from her face with her unencumbered hand. Her opposite arm was cradled in a sling which the medic ensured them was only necessary for the day or two required for the nanites to work their magic. That aside, the only other evidence of their failed mission and the injury incurred therein was the swathe of bandages creeping above the neck of her shirt and the softness exhaustion lended her usually sharp features.

“You coming in or what?” she asked.

Widowmaker obliged, slipping through the door with care before bumping it shut with her hip. Sunshine illuminated the typically darkened room, throwing its light across the walls and bed in a wild, radiant pane that made the hacker’s room somehow more inviting than usual - warm, lived-in, soft. She had opened the curtains as she left the evening prior, to Sombra’s chagrin, insisting sunlight would do her well, even if only to bolster her mood. Ironic, coming from her.

“You didn’t,” Sombra started, violet eyes hovering on the tray.

“I did,” the assassin replied, crossing to the bedside and setting the tray on the adjacent nightstand.

“ _Araña_.”

“ _Quoi_?”

“You didn’t have to.”

“I did,” Widowmaker retorted, offering her the mimosa by the rim of the glass. Sombra accepted, lifting it to her nose and sniffing with a knowing smirk.

“I missed,” Widowmaker continued quietly, sitting at the edge of the bed. “I missed and you were injured because of it. Breakfast in bed is the very least I could do, and it is far from enough.”

Her admission, even coupled with the offering of breakfast, felt inadequate, a poor conveyance of the heaviness that settled in her chest and stayed there even after the weight of that dead soldier was long removed. Widowmaker wasn’t sure what to call it - guilt was the most obvious choice, but there was a complexity to this burden she struggled to parse, a collection of independent sentiments informing its composition. Failure was among them, redolent in its vicious poignancy, its blistering sharpness the only thing that had been required to reduce her to her basest, violent instincts. But there were other inclinations there, present only in her interactions with the hacker, warm and embarrassingly tender despite the cold baseline by which she was programmed to operate.

Now, sitting beside Sombra as the sun threw its light beneath her sleep-tousled hair, Widowmaker wasn’t sure a name was necessary.

“Would you like to go to France? With me?” she asked abruptly.

Sombra blinked, midway through raising a spoonful of cereal to her mouth. “ _Que_?”

“My family owns a château outside of Annecy. Beautiful, but mostly abandoned. I was thinking some renovations were in order.”

“Let me know when you get the time,” the hacker shrugged. “I’d go.”

“We have the time.”

Sombra tilted her head, curious. “Go on.”

“I ah,” Widowmaker began, a shy grin tucked into the corner of her mouth, “I may have secured us a few weeks’ vacation effective whenever you are feeling well.”

For a long, unbroken moment, Sombra simply stared at her. Eventually, she set the bowl of cereal aside and reached out with her good hand, curling a loose fist in the knit of the taller woman’s sweater and tugging gently.

“What?” Widowmaker asked, allowing herself to be pulled closer.

“I want to kiss you.”

“You are hurt,” she protested, even as she rolled onto one arm and settled at the hacker’s side.

“It’s a kiss,  _araña_ , not a boxing match.”

Widowmaker smiled, small but sincere as she leaned into the hacker’s grip and pressed her lips to Sombra’s, sinking into the warmth she found there that was unfamiliar and welcoming in equal measure.

They lingered a long moment even after breaking apart, nothing between them but the space of their breath and ghost of Sombra’s grin against her own.

“You don’t have a garden at this place, do you?” the spy asked with the faintest brush of teeth against her bottom lip.

“No gardening. Promise.”


	4. Romance Languages and Shit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> By E.   
> Sombra knows a thing or two about love languages.   
> A bridge happens.

“Did you do my laundry?” Sombra asked, sitting stiffly up in bed as Widowmaker set a basket full of neatly folded clothing on the floor by her dresser.

“Someone had to,” the sniper scoffed, opening up the drawers one by one and depositing the garments in the closest approximation of where they belonged that she could ascertain. Sombra hadn’t made it easy. For the most part, her clothing landed where it landed, and folding was optional at best.

“That’s my underwear,” she whined, watching Widowmaker mechanically place them in the top right drawer.

“And?” Widow asked, raising an eyebrow as she dropped in a pair of panties with the phrase  _Wild at Heart_  scrawled across them in pink text.

Sombra felt herself reddening, although she couldn’t pinpoint precisely what had her so embarrassed: Widow handling her unmentionables or the sheer fact of her doing her laundry in the first place. She wasn’t wrong - someone needed to do it. She just hadn’t figured it’d be Talon’s prize assassin.

“You don’t have to do all this for me,  _araña_ ,” she said softly, pushing the blankets aside and shoving her feet into a pair of purple fuzzy slippers. “Hell,  _I_  don’t do this for me.” Padding over to the dresser, she stood awkwardly by the spider as she filled and closed the final drawer.

“I want to,” Widowmaker replied, her face expressionless as she stood up. Reaching out to gently brush at Sombra’s recently unbandaged shoulder, she dropped her hand to her side. “You should be in bed.”

“I can stand just fine,” she said, smiling and tugging at the waistband of Widow’s jeans to pull her closer. The spider acquiesced with only the slightest hesitation, and the hacker pressed herself against the taller woman’s chest, smiling into her collarbone. “Thank you.”

Widow brought one hand around Sombra’s waist and the other tentatively to her hair, the unfamiliarity of touch still obvious in the way she so gingerly reciprocated any of Sombra’s initiations. Ever since that first kiss, they’d changed the pace to their slow dance of casual intimacy, moving far outside the realm of plausible platonic deniability into something altogether  _not_. The sheer outrageous reality of such gentleness growing between two individuals with their unique qualifications was enough to make Sombra more comfortable with it than she felt she had any right to be. Widowmaker, for her part, didn’t seem upset by the perceptible shift in their interactions - she just seemed deeply confused as to how to respond.

After a decade of little more than a string of conscripted violence, Sombra figured that made plenty of sense.

“Do you need anything?” the spider asked against the shaved side of her head. Her words were halted, but to the best the hacker could discern, sincere.

“ _Sí, araña_ ,” she said, looking up at her with a playful grin. “But you may need to wait for me to heal a bit more before you give it to me.”

Widowmaker blushed. Sombra kissed the place where her jaw met the side of her neck, extricated herself from her embrace, and made her way back into bed.

The sniper stood there for a moment, face a blank canvas of potential emotion, the gears in her head turning with an almost visible effort as she parsed through whatever parade of diluted feelings were tickling at the base of her mind.

“I will check on you tomorrow?” she said, awkwardly, grabbing the laundry basket and clutching it like a lifeline.

“Please do,” Sombra smiled, nestling down into the blankets and grabbing the stuffed bear she’d managed to keep with her since leaving Dorado. Widowmaker nodded, closing the door behind her as she left, and Sombra let herself drift off to sleep.

* * *

Every morning, Widowmaker appeared in Sombra’s room and opened the curtains to let the sun in. Sombra hated it, feigning sleep and closing them again as soon as she left to keep the offending ball of sunlight out of her eyes as she desperately attempted to grab a few more winks of sleep. Sombra may have been an early riser, but she was  _not_  enthusiastic about it, and sunlight came after pyjamas and coffee in her list of morning rituals, not before.

It was nice, though, that she thought of it every day, and Sombra wasn’t under the impression that Widow was doing it for any reason other than she perceived it to be to the hacker’s benefit. She was like a silent shadow, always waiting for some opportunity to do something, from making breakfast to cleaning her room, and it didn’t take long for Sombra to realize she was doing it because it was the only comfortable way for her to express her guilt and desire to be needed.

Grumbling, Sombra tossed the covers aside and proceeded to rifle through Widowmaker’s meticulous arrangement of her clothing until she found the softest, warmest, most comfortable pair of pyjamas she owned. Topping off the ‘reluctantly conscious’ look with a black and purple hoodie, she slumped down the stairs to make some coffee and salvage the remainder of her morning’s order.

When she reached the kitchen, it looked as though someone had beaten her to the carafe. “Less work for me,” she shrugged, heading to the cabinet to get a mug. She leaned over the counter and reached for the high shelf, yelping as a sharp shot of pain radiated from her shoulder to her elbow. She tried again, more gingerly this time, but it appeared as though her muscles were having none of it.

Scowling at her continued inability to perform simple tasks, she felt a presence press up behind her and saw one long blue arm reach up on her right, snatching two mugs from the shelf and placing them on the counter.

“ _Bon matin_ ,” the sniper said, a tentative hand placed gently on Sombra’s hip in greeting before she moved to fill their cups. “It’s good to see you up.” Leaning against the counter, Widowmaker watched Sombra with a ferocity bordering on disconcerting for 7am.

“Can’t stay in bed forever,” she shrugged, staring down at the hot cup of liquid with a glare intended to frighten it into a drinkable temperature. “Places to go, people to hack, systems to modify. Or systems to hack and people to modify? I can never tell. Guts and circuits all blur together after a while.”

“You’re looking well this morning, Sombra,” a voice intruded on their exchange as Gabriel walked sullenly into the kitchen. He seemed sincere, though - as sincere as the man ever was. In another life, he and Sombra might have even been friends for how well their dry sarcasm blended into one giant cloud of insulting humor.

“Nothing like a brush with death to really shock the life back into a girl, you know?” she said, casually sipping the coffee, ignoring its unchanged scalding temperature for the sake of effect.

“Ha ha,” was his garrulous reply, equal parts caustic and reluctantly amused. He stepped past her for his own cup, helping himself to the coffee. “I’m sure we’ll have plenty more opportunities to get you killed in the future.”

Sombra waved her hand dismissively as she started out of the kitchen. “Not before my vacation,  _jefe_ ,” she said.

“Your what?” he asked, voice rasping out the question like a dry cough.

“Ask Widow!” she shouted back, disappearing into the other room.

Gabriel looked at Widowmaker. The sniper sipped her coffee in one long, slow motion.

“Two weeks,” was all she said, and Gabriel simply shook his head and left the room.

* * *

When Widowmaker stopped by that evening, she knocked first. It was not a strange gesture in itself, but lately she had simply taken it upon herself to push the door open gently in the assumption that Sombra wouldn’t be able to open it for her.

Sombra set down the scoop she was using at Toulouse’s litter box and started for the door before pausing and running to the curtains to open them back up from where she’d closed them that morning. Satisfied with her ruse, she opened the door. “ _Araña_ ,” she greeted her, the pet name she’d once leveraged as a casual jab now feeling more like a true term of endearment. “Since when do you knock?”

Widowmaker, dressed down and looking as though she were ready for bed, glanced up, then at the litter box, then toward the window. “You seemed better this morning. I didn’t want to intrude.”

“You’re never intruding. That’s definitely my job,” Sombra replied, gesturing for her to come in and pushing the door shut behind her with the toe of her slipper.

“You’re healing well?” Widowmaker asked as Sombra returned to finish Toulouse’s box. Toulouse was making it as difficult as possible, repeatedly trying to get back into the box as she was actively cleaning it. Chiding him in Spanish, she finally managed to shoo him away with a toy, tossing the filled bag of cat poop next to the garbage can to bring downstairs to the trash next she was headed that way

“I feel better,” she replied, rolling her shoulder and hearing it crack. “For the most part at least.” She wiped her palms off on her pants and headed toward the bathroom. “Gimme a minute,” she said, disappearing to wash her hands.

When she came back out a minute later, Widowmaker was standing in the same spot, stiff and with a look of inner conflict on her face. She seemed uncomfortable without a task to perform, standing in the doorway looking for a purpose and finding nothing but the empty expanse of actions and emotions she had such a hard time connecting. It was as obvious as anything now, Sombra thought to herself.

“You want to help me brush this beast?” she said, picking Toulouse up from where he was winding around her legs in a bid for a second dinner. “He’s a bit unruly when you’re trying to tame his fur. He’s getting so  _big_.”

“You don’t need my help,” Widowmaker said, expression implacable, but Sombra could read the way her body tensed and the sharp, sudden crease of her eyes. She’d gotten good at interpreting Widowmaker’s subtle physical responses to stress. Probably better than Widowmaker herself was at it.

“You know,” she said, setting Toulouse down and walking closer to the sniper, leaning casually against her dresser, “it’s not like I  _mind_  it when you help me.” She shrugged, smiling. “It’s nice, really. Makes me think you like being around me.”

“I do,” Widow said with a sudden forcefulness that lent no small amount of strength to her otherwise empty words. “I don’t know how else to express that but by helping.”

“You can just be around me if you want,  _araña_.”

Widowmaker hesitated, her search for words a visible struggle. “Closeness is strange for me. Even when I kill, I am at a distance.”

“Well then don’t kill me and come here.”

Widowmaker furrowed her brow and took one faltering step forward. “You cannot always build a bridge for me.”

“Then meet me halfway across.” Sombra grabbed for Widowmaker’s hands, tugging her toward her until they were just barely touching, in that way that felt more intimate than any embrace. “Listen,  _araña_. I’m no expert here either. I don’t form relationships; I use them, tear them apart. I’m internationally known for being a giant manipulative asshole.”

“The exact qualifications cited when you were hired,” Widow replied, subtle humor masked below her monotone, as per usual.

Sombra laughed. “At least my brand’s intact.” She put a hand on Widow’s chest, feeling the sniper’s slow, steady heartbeat. “If there’s one single thing I have learned through it all, it’s that I’m a big fan of being close to things. It’s how I communicate, no matter what it is I’m communicating. Touch is important to me.”

“I think it may be important to me, too.” Widowmaker lifted up a hand and ran it lightly over the shaved side of Sombra’s head, pausing to linger on the back of her neck for just a moment.

Sombra nodded, thinking that such a thing made perfect sense, all told. “So that’s a thing we know now. We have that in common.” She stepped away from Widow and hopped up on her bed. “You ah,” she smirked, patting the bed beside her, “wanna snuggle?”

A small whisper of a smile - something Sombra had come to treasure from the spider - appeared on her face. “I think I do,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “With a single caveat.”

“What’s that?”

 

Widow’s hesitant smile grew into something full and true. She walked over and climbed onto the bed next to the hacker, tucking her legs underneath her. For once, she gave no tentative berth to their proximity, one hand on her arm and lips featherlight against Sombra’s ear as she whispered her response.

“I’m the big spoon.”


End file.
